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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

One nice thing about San Francisco is we have many great alternatives for ISPs. Comcast truly is terrible. Wave Broadband is an excellent competing cable Internet company. Sonic is the best ISP I have ever had or could even imagine; reliable symmetric gigabit fiber, super low latency (4ms to the edge, it's all glass), tech support that knows what they're doing. There's also MonkeyBrains for 100+Mbps fixed wireless. Not all of these are available everywhere, particularly across the whole Bay Area, but compared to most of America that's captive to a duopoly of mediocrity we're pretty well off.

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Meh, I'll vote to the contrary; Comcast works roughly 99.95% of the time for me. Obviously that's an approximation, but I rarely experience outages and I've been using them from two apartments in the South Bay for 10 years. The first few years they'd occasionally have local service outages around 2am but since then I rarely have outages of any kind and my speeds are great. Not as high as they say I do but supposedly sometimes higher when I do speed tests.

And as far as alternatives, in the Southbay it's very limited. I looked into this when I moved earlier this year and even Sonic only had DSL available where I live now. AT&T didn't even offer gigabit, and I'm not exactly in a bad spot other than that it's a suburb area (but I'm extremely close to a HQ for a FAANG).

Make that 99.9%. There were two unscheduled multi-hour outages (each time a Friday afternoon) during day time of Comcast's service in the South Bay in as many years. Perfectly acceptable for a leisure offer. Those working from home these days who cannot rush into the office or take some time off, I suppose have a 2nd connection (e.g. 4G/5G).

I'm glad Comcast is working well for you. The Bay Area Comcast seems reasonably well provisioned and doesn't suffer the massive evening slowdowns so much of the country does. Comcast still has a history of doing stupid things though, back to the days they injected RST packets to try to stop BitTorrent.

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/11/eff-study-reve...

You should actually measure your network uptime. You’d be surprised how much maintenance happens at 3am. When people are up doing maintenance.

Palo Alto is halfway between Google and Facebook. It doesn't have reliable fiber. Hell, the electric grid can barely be called reliable.

Sonic fiber is available by building, not neighborhood.

Really miss having FiOS when I lived in NYC. AT&T has some dark fiber on the pole just outside my house but hasn't lit it up.

Also Webpass (which got bought by Google fiber). It's only available in select buildings in SF but I've had good luck with them for the most part.

+1 webpass

The few years our small business used Comcast Business were bad. There would be multi-hour outages every other month. It got to the point where I wrote up procedures so an office worker could log into our ASUS router and switch the gateway over to a smartphone hotspot. That got tiring, so I ended up upgrading our router to support automatic failover to an LTE device.

In contrast, AT&T DSL FTTN (Fiber to the Node) and Sonic DSL (not resold) have been rock solid. I am using AT&T for both home and business now and can't remember the last time there was an outage or issues with the modem. For me, a stable connection at 50mbps is preferable to unstable 1gig.

I would rather support Sonic, but they don't have fiber in my area and I had a bad experience with their resold AT&T FTTN service that was beyond their control. Their straight DSL product is solid, as long as you are close to the central office and can get a good speed.

My current apartment has Wave as one of the options, my experience is not that good and I know many Wave users are considering switching to comcast because comcast users in the same building report better uptime. We have one outage per month on average and Wave don't publish service status at all so it is almost impossible to know whether the outage is just my home router or issue in the area (you can call the support number but good luck with that when everyone else is calling the same number during an outage).

ISP monopolies are a huge problem and I find smaller ISPs tend to have better services. My previous apartment has a dedicated support team from a small ISP, and the tier 1 rep on the support line was capable of explaining the building's network topology and how they do natting.

That's a relatively new "nice thing", though. Amongst a lot of techies it was actually a joke how bad SV and SFO had it with internet options until recently.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/fcc-siding-landlords-a...

Monkeybrains has been servicing SF since 1998

I really wish I had other viable options. I live in SOMA and I have 1Gbps service from Comcast, which did go out last night.

My other options are DSL, so it's going to max out at 20Mbps or so.

I do have roof access, so I guess I could also see about MonkeyBrains.

All that said, during the outage, I just tethered to my iPhone on an AT&T unlimited plan, and was able to stream full quality video to my laptop. I think I speed tested it to about 80Mbps.

I have both monkeybrains and comcast, with two of us working from home it is worth it for peace of mind. The way the concrete flooring and stucco walls in the building work means tethering doesn't work very well but I would go with that otherwise. They are both pretty reliable and pretty fast overall, much faster than DSL. But have been a few times one goes down, or has intermittent packet loss. The monkeybrains setup we use goes over coax and it is compatible with comcast going over the same physical coax and a media splitter.

This is true in the city. Unfortunately there aren't any options in the peninsula. When WFH started, I had 1000ms+ pings for over a month and had to have 2 alternate SIM tethering plans to keep working. Comcast acknowledged that they weren't able to handle the surge of traffic but still refused to refund the months long outage.

In the South Bay it's only AT&T DSL or Comcast cable.

I suppose Sonic is also an option that I would love to entertain, but they're just reselling AT&T DSL here.

If only we had municipal broadband, but the corps own the infrastructure and have long contracts with the cities :(

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